July Top Ten

1. Book clubs. Why I didn't join one earlier is beyond me. But thanks to a colleague, I am now part of a small but enriching conglomeration of bibliophiles who remind me to eat my fiction vegetables on a weekly basis. After having been involved for only a few months, I'm totally committed. I highly recommend the experience, especially as an antidote to the loneliness epidemic. We meet on Zoom so you don't need to reside in a densely populated area to join one. There's even a website to facilitate the process. Visit bookclubs.com today! The second book since I've joined is Borges' Labyrinths which we're about halfway through (new favorite story = "Funes the Memorious"). The first was...

 2.  Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice; Pride and Prejudice (BBC, 1995). I loved it more for its status as an ur-text than for any of its masterful narrative devices. One can feel the brusque-but-tameable hero of Harlequin romances gestating in Mr. Darcy, for instance. Austen was loathe to provide much description of place so the BBC adaptation was a welcome guide through the dialogue-heavy novel. I hope the forthcoming Netflix series makes Mrs. Bennett (Olivia Colman) less of a Chicken Little. At the very least, I think most of us share her confusion, if not rage, over entails.

3. Sally Rooney: "Misreading Ulysses," The Paris Review, December 7, 2022; Rebecca Romney: Jane Austen's Bookshelf - A Rare Book Collector's Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend (Simon & Schuster, 2025). Rooney's thesis on how Ulysses both dismantles and upholds the innovations of Pride and Prejudice is intriguing. Austen synthesized the masculine traditions of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding with the feminine traditions of Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, and Eliza Haywood and there's a parallel synthesis of the masculine (Stephen Dedalus) and feminine (Molly Bloom) in Leopold Bloom. But this conclusion is predicated on the dubious, if not flat-out incorrect, characterization of Austen as "the author of the earliest novels in the English language still widely read and loved in the present day." Under the influence of Rooney, I was surprised to find mention of any books at all in Pride and Prejudice much less that the act of reading comprises a fair bit of the narrative ambience. This is where Romney's book helps. As a reading experience, it's not recommended - Wiki-style biographies of pre-Austen writers punctuated by recollections of Romney's rare-book exploits. But as a guide for What To Read Next/After Austen, it's indispensable. Onward to Frances Burney, Charlotte Lennox, Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, etc.

4. Doug Rice: Blood of Mugwump - A Tiresian Tale of Incest (FC2, 1996). A slim avant-garde novel in which a character (more like a node, really) named Doug Rice morphs into and out of his sister and grandmother. The words "cock" and "cunt" appear with frequency. Rice quotes Joyce, Faulkner, and the Pointer Sisters. A line like "By carefully studying a videotape, he had learned a trick from Meryl Streep about different ways to alter x-rays" snaps you out of the miasma of permeable borders before plunging you back into the Imaginary "world without words, amen." Photos (some fin-de-20ème-siècle, some contemporary) purporting to depict Rice and/or his sister illustrate several chapters (called "routines" here). Subsequent works by Rice include Janey Quixote and A Good Cuntboy is Hard to Find.

5. Charles Baxter: Blood Test - A Comedy (Pantheon, 2024). Unfunny variation on Minority Report wherein a suburban nobody pays thousands to a shady Theranos-type entity which claims it can predict that he will commit a murder. Always trust an author who lards his novel with arch directions such as "just flip ahead a couple of pages after you've gone out to your kitchen for some popcorn and a beer, and the story will resume." Done, dude.  

 

6. Louis-Ferdinand Céline: Journey to the End of the Night (1932); Paul Bowles: Let It Come Down (1952); Graham Greene: A Burnt-Out Case (1960). Three Heart of Darkness variations that need to be put down for a nap. The best I can say for the Greene is that I excavated one handy apreçu ("As usual there was no silence [in a Congo leper colony]. Silence belonged to cities.") and a cranky but funny one-liner ("Perhaps it's His will that you should take a nembutal."). The worst I can say about the Bowles is that I highlighted only two lines of its 300-plus pages. Improbably, the Céline was the best of the lot even though it's the longest/hardest to take and the author was a widely read anti-Semite. The locales are far-flung (i.e., the hero escapes deepest Africa) which knocks some of the stuffing out of the colonialist existentialism. Céline has a feel for flânerie in New York City, Detroit, and Paris. And he mentions avant-garde films, supernaturally hip for 1932. But in case you're curious, know that the opening of William T. Vollman's afterword does a spot-on impression of all three authorial voices: “Reader, fuck you!...You think I give a shit whether or not you’ve read this book? Or that Céline’s ghost does? That would be the day!” So reader, make this the day you read something else. 

 

7. The Listeners (Janicza Bravo, 2024). This four-episode BBC One miniseries, adapted by Jordan Tannahill from his 2021 novel, concerns an English teacher (Rebecca Hall, superb) driven to despair by The Hum, a low frequency emanating from an undetctable source. She's relieved to discover a group of people who claim to hear it as well. But they soon display cultish tendencies, a fiasco only exacerbated by the fact that she's grown closer to one of the listeners - her teenage student. Inspired by real testimonials, The Listeners focuses too much on the interpersonal to the detriment of the intrapersonal, to how sound can reorient our relationship to our bodies. But especially under the tutelage of Bravo, who directed 2020's fantastic @Zola, it's a heartbreaking portrayal of how trauma and illness can destroy relationships while creating unforeseen ones, reminiscent of Fearless (Peter Weir, 1993), Away from Her (Sarah Polley, 2006), and Safe (Todd Haynes, 1995).  

8. "Boots" from 28 Years Later (Danny Boyle, 2025). The film is a solid B+. But the score, composed by Scottish hip-hop soundscapers Young Fathers, is one of the best I've ever heard. As usual, you cannot glean this from the soundtrack album (on Milan) although it's far less abstract than the norm, beginning with two surprisingly jaunty songs as opposed to limbs desperate to find their host bodies. But heard in the film, a track like "Boots" augments the horror of this third installment in the zombie franchise. The Fathers sample a 1915 spoken-word recording of Rudyard Kipling's harrowing anti-war poem "Boots" as if it were the reanimated dead. Recited by American actor Taylor Holmes with increasing terror, it appears on the film's soundtrack with no clear source such that we don't know if the sound is diegetic. It just creeps towards us, dragging along industrial groans and ululations. Then it disappears, and we're left fearful of its return.

9. Lola Young: This Wasn't Meant for You Anyway (Island, 2024). 23 when this second album was released last year, Young already has the makings of a supernova. And she seems poised to stick around if only because she comes off so tough. Pressed up against the fourth wall on the cover, she's in our face throughout. Ten out of eleven songs come with an explicit language warning, including the spoken-word "Outro." But because she's so tough, the men and women in her life think she can handle the ghosting, co-dependency, and assholism they throw her way. These time-wasting drips put her on the defense starting with the great album title and winding through each song wherein she tells them all precisely where to get off in her cigarette-cured South Londonese. So here's hoping her longest-lasting relationship is with producers/songwriters/musicians Carter Lang (SZA, the new Justin Bieber) and Buddy Ross (Haim, Travis Scott) because together with Young, they've conjured at least eight different ways to grab your ear - distressed bhangra, poppin' post-punk, open-spaced verses clashing against brickwalled choruses, whatever Lola wants. All of which is to prep you for the September 19th release of her next album, I'm Only F**king Myself.

10. Leaving...on the Criterion Channel. My new favorite genre! Almost 100 years ago, Walter Benjamin clocked collecting/hoarding as a method for denying mortality; can't die when I have twenty-and-forever-counting hard drives choked with films, music, and books to consume. But mere death isn't enough to help with prioritizing what particular text to consume. Each month the Criterion Channel mimics death with an entire category of films leaving the channel that month. It's a perfect way to move from collecting to consuming (yes yes with Adorno cackling at you from beyond). By July 31st, I downed all the Argentinian noirs (fave was Fernando Ayala's nasty 1956 The Bitter Stems), most of the Noir and the Blacklist titles (John Berry's unbearably intense 1951 He Ran All the Way deserves to be better known), and even some mainstream crap (1990's Blue Steel, one of Kathryn Bigelow's worst). And I look forward to filling in some Guiraudie and Chang-Dong gaps by August 31st.

September Top Ten

1. Travis Baldree: Legends & Lattes (Tor, 2022). I'm stunned myself. This fantasy novel begins like countless others. An orc named Viv violently vanquishes her enemy. But that takes up only a two-page prologue. Viv puts down her sword and travels far to open a coffee shop. Instead of over-narrativizing with dreary world building, Baldree traces the everyday challenges of Viv's endeavor - introducing the townsfolk to coffee in the first place; expanding the menu; going easy on the freebees; figuring out how to deal with customers who stay for hours nursing one cup; rigging a primitive form of air conditioning; booking entertainment; etc. As more Lord of the Rings types become invested in the success of the shop, the story takes on a Mickey and Judy "let's put on a show" feel. For narrative tension, some of the landed gentry demand taxation. But overall, it reminded me of nothing so much as the delightful processual thrust of James M. Cain's Mildred Pierce. Low-stakes fantasy this subgenre is called and I was completely disarmed by Baldree's ability to hold the reader's attention by portraying people simply working together. As one critic put it, "it's sweet, beautiful, and, most of all, kind." And yes, I have the prequel, Bookshops & Bonedust, on my iPad right now.

2.  Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution (PBS series). Episode One - "Rock the Boat" is a fabulously insightful meditation on the origins of disco. Episode Two - "Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now" marks disco's mainstream popularity and, predictably, hits all the beats of a Wikipedia article. Episode Three - "Stayin' Alive" is abject nonsense about disco's supposed comeback with nary of mention of where it's been for the last 45 years. Caveat saltator.

3. Jungle: "Let's Go Back" (Caiola). You all keep sleeping on this nu-disco combo. But you're missing yet another copper-plated dreamscape of the Stylistics, doo-wop, and shaky memories of dancefloors past.

4. The Bear Season 3. The most frustrating show on television today. Even though the first episode came off like an extended previously-on segment, I admired its drifty pointlessness. And Tina's (Liza Colón-Zayas) backstory was welcome and moving. But Donna's (Jamie Lee Curtis) presence always promises torture porn. Her Actors Studio scene with Natalie (Abby Elliott) had more give to it than last season's preposterous, feel-bad Christmas Eve episode. But it provides no narrative air ducts for the tension to pass through. And the final episode was a storytelling disaster making it impossible to determine Chef Andrea Terry's (Olivia Colman) relationship to half of the cast. Maybe the series' architects will put it all together in Season 4. Or maybe they'll figure out whether or not they're making a comedy.

5. Maria (Pablo Larraín). At lunch before the New York Film Festival screening, my friend Jody and I were discussing various forms of amateurism as a means of maintaining good mental hygiene - cleaning, baking, attending Lady Gaga dance classes, walking, working out for sanity rather than weight loss per se, Nailed It!, etc. During the Q&A after the screening, Angelina Jolie discussed her months-long preparation to become Maria Callas and explained that she broke down in tears the first time she sang. Singing is way to let out all that we hold in, Jolie noted, and she encouraged everyone in attendance to try singing for that very benefit. Both moments deepened what has now become Larraín biopic boilerplate. It's not much different from previous outings such as Jackie (2016) and Spencer (2021), spiraling out from one concentrated event, here the last week of Callas' life. She hasn't sung live in three years and is testing a comeback. But what she truly wants is simply to sing for herself and the tragedy here is that no one (sometimes including herself) will allow the diva to do so. Larraín gives us a glimpse of Callas as an amateur and the film constitutes a testament to what Christopher Small calls "musicking," the act of creating music free from recordings, command performances, and divadom, music as method to potentially save your life.

6. Miséricorde (Alain Guiraudie). Avoid the Wikipedia synopsis since it gives the entire film away. I'll keep it vague here. Jérémie (a terrifically blank performance by Félix Kysyl) returns to his small hometown to attend a funeral. But shiftless and pretty, he decides to stick around to both the annoyance and delight of various villagers. Awkwardness soon shades into violence and a hideous crime has to be covered up. Guiraudie keeps things tense by utilizing the narrative lacunae of art cinema. But he also resorts to some tired devices such as Jérémie frequently overhearing story-forwarding information as if he were a character hiding in a corner of Downton Abbey. And he has a priest deliver the film's big message in a fit of collegiate existentialism at the edge of a tall hill overlooking humanity below. Then again, Guiraudie isn't after any tight connections. He's a master of wielding Hitchcockian guilt such that the last third of the film becomes lighter as delight eclipses annoyance and we grow itchy over the attraction certain characters (and perhaps we the viewers) feel to an evil protagonist. Alfred would be proud.  

7. Melissa Kirsch, "At Capacity" The New York Times, September 28, 2024; Miranda Lambert: Postcards from Texas (Vanner/Republic/Big Loud). Kirsch asks a question that keeps nagging me as I age and my internal hard drive becomes overamped and lossy: "If we can’t remember the things we’ve read and watched and even loved, do they still 'count'?" Fortunately, she calls on Maryanne Wolf, a neuroscientist, to put us somewhat at ease: "The information you get from a book is stored in networks. We have an extraordinary capacity for storage, and much more is there than you realize. It is in some way working on you even though you aren’t thinking about it." Still, I gravitate towards pop and song doctors in particular whose job is to keep pressing our random recall buttons. Thanks to such architects, I can hum every damn song off one of my favorite country albums of the year. Lambert's latest has been accused of lacking the spunk. But to my cheap ears, I hear "Looking Back on Luckenbach" as a classic wedding song in the making, "Alimony" a classic karaoke song in the making, and "Way Too Good at Breaking My Heart" a classic ripoff of Foreigner's "Waiting for a Girl Like You" in the making. Granted, as one of the premier album artists of our era, Lambert's settling into a ho-hum eminence akin to, oh, Sleater-Kinney, sure to forever entertain but doomed to never risk a surprise. But I remain grateful for the meta "Dammit Randy" about a loser who broke up with a pre-fame Lambert and is now relegated to turning her up on the radio. As she sings most memorably and thematically, "I've got your attention." And authenticity fans take note: Lambert wrote the best song, "Run," all by herself. 

8.  Mark Harris, "How Bad Can It Get For Hollywood?" The New York Times, March 1, 2024.  Finally - the rejoinder I've been looking for when superhero movie fans call me a snob for hyping art cinema and the avant-garde. Discussing forthcoming non-franchise titles such as Hamnet and Novocaine, Harris zings, "These are self-contained films that don’t demand moviegoers have a Ph.D. in previous installments or extended universes."

9. LL Cool J: The FORCE (LL Cool J, Inc./Def Jam/VMG). His first album in eleven years and, since you didn't know, fourteenth overall, The FORCE may improbably be LL Cool J's best ever. Produced by Q-Tip, it moves like trillions of microorganisms in your guts with Can and Gary Numan samples and an unexpected and affectionate evocation of Black family life in "Black Code Special." But there's a tree-falling-in-the-woods quality to its supernova appearance. It's an old man's hip-hop album so on the cranky "30 Decembers," he worries about who this album is for. "These kids don't even know who I am," he admits right after castigating them for being on their phones and computers instead of "readin' the papers." He brags about being postmodern on one track and calls another track "Post Modern" as if he finally downed all those late 1980s John Leland Singles columns in Spin. Even though The FORCE sounds more alive than most hip-hop has in years, is this youth music? And does it matter?

10. Criterion 24/7.  I should be all Old Man Yells at Cloud about this. For years before Karagarga, I would trade VHS tapes with people in Estonia and Japan for a chance to see an obscure art film in hideous quality. Or I'd have to wait literally months if not years for The End (Christopher Maclaine, 1953) to download on eMule (never happened). Now there's a gotdang spigot showering all manner of obscurities and classics into your living room. But as a film democratist, I love it. As I'm writing this, a film/director I've never heard of is streaming - Fisting: Never Tear Us Apart (Whammy Alcazaren, 2022) and yeah, that kind of fisting, of all things. Part of the fun is trying to guess a title. If you give up, then check out Criterion's What's On Now page for the answer.